This may sound like bitching, and of course in some sense it is. But it began to occur to me that the tech I was using was incredibly gendered. In the “male” sphere, of professional operations, offices, corporations, pop culture, businesses, the available technology was extremely high-level, better than anywhere I’d yet lived. In the “female” sphere, the home, domestic duties, daily chores, cleaning, heating, anything inside the walls of a house, it was on a level my grandmother would find familiar.

Something out of the ordinary happens when cisgender adults talk about transgender children. People who wouldn’t normally make a child’s genitals a public issue are suddenly desperate to publicly scrutinize and debate the intimate details of children’s bodies. Some of these bodies belong to kids as young or younger than seven, like Bobby Montoya, the first openly trans Girl Scout.

At Love Joy Feminism (one of my new favourite blogs), “You can’t pray the gay away, even at BJU” discusses those LGBTIQ individuals who study at Bob Jones University and realise that they’re not straight and that being LBGTIQ is ok (though a long journey to get there for some).

I grew up believing that being gay is a disorder of some sort, likely caused by either sexual abuse or having an absent father or distant mother, and that gay people can be “cured” through prayer and therapy and go on to lead normal lives as straight people. No one from a functional, Christian family should ever end up gay.

But of course, the reality doesn’t work out that way. And it’s that reality that these GLBT Bob Jones alumni want to make known.

Don’t mistake me. I know they exist, because I see them. They’re pretty active online, for example, and have lively communities offline as well. I’m talking about where they are in media and pop culture, because right now, it appears to be pretty much nowhere; along with the rest of nonbinary people, of course. There is something particularly sinister about the erasure of nonbinary parents and children when it comes to pop culture and mass media descriptions of families, though.

Margart Cho contributes to the It Gets Better project with a blog post about they bullying she survived at school:

I was bullied pretty badly when I was a kid, the worst period falling between the ages of 10 and 14, I think. People tell me to get over it, and that I am an adult now, privileged and famous and constantly applauded not only in my primary field, stand-up comedy, but also in practically every endeavor I have chosen to devote myself to, from acting to burlesque bump-and-grind to songwriting. I am told I have no right to complain, and that may be true to some extent, the good in my life flowing in from all directions, satisfaction pulsing through me every second of the day, but I will never stop complaining until I am dead in the ground or even afterward, probably, if I can find a way back out of the light to complain about the afterlife. I will never stop complaining. It’s kind of fun to me now, and looking back, I was treated so terribly that I don’t feel I have the capacity to forgive. Fuck forgiveness and all that. I think that even Jesus would say, “Yeah I guess you do have a point…”

A very interesting article at New Matilda, “The War On Birth Control“, detailing issues of the current US Republican Presidential wassname that they have going on currently. The article, despite my issues with the US democratic system, is a very interesting read:

Obama’s hard-fought health reforms, the Affordable Care Act, include a provision that requires all employee insurance plans to cover contraception — without any religious exemption. In practical terms, this means that the employees of religious-affiliated institutions such as universities and hospitals (but not churches themselves) will have access to birth control as part of their health insurance. Twenty eight states had similar provisions before this announcement and the stated goal is to provide more affordable birth control.

A bill introduced by Republican up-and-comer Mario Rubio attempts to counter the lifting of the religious amendment. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow not only religious-affiliated institutions to opt out of employee health plans which cover contraception, but also those provided by individual employers whose religious beliefs are at odds with contraception.